Emerald Group Publishing Limited Emotions, Decision-Making, Conflict and Cooperation: 25 (Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development, 25)

The role of emotions is important in explaining conflicts and their resolution. Witness the emotions surrounding the outbreak of wars past and current and their endings. In order to introduce the perspective of emotions as an explanatory scheme of conflict escalation and crises, a comparison to classical conceptions such as the pursuit of power or commercial and financial interests is warranted. On first glance these two explanatory schemes seem to be at opposite extremes. However, new approaches to decision-making and rationality and challenges to the traditional expected utility model make these two conceptions much more compatible. The new perspective of rank dependent expected utility and the closely related notion of utility functions, which can both represent risk averse and risk preferring attitudes in decision-making go a long way in incorporating emotions within otherwise rational choices. One can thus build models that account more easily for conflict escalations but also for conflict resolution. These theoretical considerations are investigated within empirical cases of civil wars and shown to be effective in explaining the origins but also the breakdown of conflicts. Review The author considers the role of emotions and rationality in conflict and cooperation between groups and countries. He discusses behavioral neuroscience research on the topic and examines various models of conflict, including interest-based approaches, a model that synthesizes behavioral neuroscience and interest-based explanations, the rank dependent expected utility model, and an agent-based model, and addresses the role of economic conditions and examples of civil wars. -- Annotation ©2017, (protoview.com) About the Author Urs Luterbacher is Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, and Chair of the Political Science Department at the Institute.